We are currently incubating additional communities of passion, purpose and practice to delve into the following problem domains and create Opportunity Statements to address them:
Everyone at the Table.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: Provisional Problem Appraisal: Historically, marginalized peoples and communities are most impacted by environmental problems and wellbeing challenges. As documented in the Green2.0 2023 NGO & Foundation Transparency Report Card, there is also a corresponding, systemic lack of diversity in the NGO and Foundation world. These representation challenges persist in the innovation, social impact investing, and decision-making arenas too.
Goals: Build the RCI Communities of Passion, Purpose, and Practice; governance structure and board community; and staff so that diverse voices are represented and reflected in all decision-making processes. Build additional support for marginalized peoples in our arena by creating a mentoring initiative for those early in their career, a residency program for those in mid-career, and a retreat program for other organizations.
Health Equity and Healing Trauma.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: Dr. Kinari Webb has had an outsized impact in addressing the tragic relationship between lack of access to health care and lack of agency, destruction of nature, and reduction in wellbeing. In a corollary, intersecting tragedy, the World Health Organization, estimates that 70% of the world’s population has been exposed to a traumatic event and nearly 4% of the world’s population has had a post-traumatic stress disorder at some point in their life. Health inequity and trauma, in its many forms, inhibit the emergence of humanity’s better angels and hamstring efforts to advance wellbeing for all.
Goals: Refine, scale, and equitably distribute—starting with communities most at risk and most in need—effective evidence-based solutions that employ medical care, self-awareness, self-care, and group support to heal mind, body, and spirit. Where gaps are identified, create new innovations.
Fire Safe and Resilient Design.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: A 2022 report by First Street estimates that 49.4 M properties in the United States face minor level of fire risk (with a cumulative burn probability below 1%); 20.2M properties face moderate risk (6% maximum cumulative burn probability); 6.0M face major risk (14% maximum burn probability); 2.7M face severe risk (26% maximum cumulative burn probability); and 1.5M properties face extreme risk (with cumulative burn probabilities of 26% and up). These impacts are expected to grow over the next thirty years due to climate change. Land use policy and building practices can drastically reduce the impacts of fire risk.
Goals: To advance affordable, fire-safe, regenerative construction practices that are fit for site, drastically reduce energy and water demand, and positively impact human and natural systems.
Reinventing Journalism.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: As Robert Rosenthal reports in “Reinventing Journalism,” the profit-driven model for funding investigative journalism and the attacks on journalists and journalistic freedom not only put investigative journalism at risk—they compromise the very foundations of democracy and the primary instrument for maintaining an informed citizenry.
Goals: Advance promising new models for funding investigative journalism, create new strategies for expanding its ambit and accessibility, and build additional safeguards so that it can become a more effective and sustainable agent for informing the public, exposing falsehoods and manipulation, and supporting public participation and engagement.
Water Wellness.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: While the nurturing and healing properties of water have been celebrated for millennia, the World Wildlife Fund reports that 1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to fresh water, 2.7 billion experience water scarcity for at least one month/year, 2.4 billion are faced with inadequate sanitation, and more than half of the world’s wetlands have disappeared.
Goals: Make clean water and sanitation accessible and affordable for everyone while increasing the availability of fresh water for nature, recreation, and healing through innovations that honor the miracle of water, reduce demand for wasteful and frivolous usage, enhance conservation, and support radically more efficient use and reuse.
Backyard Victory Gardens.
Provisional Problem Appraisal: According to a recent report on household food security, early 45 million people in the US are food insecure and even more have limited access to fresh, healthy, sustainably grown food. In 1944, nearly 2/3 of American households grew victory gardens, which produced 40% of the nation’s produce. Victory gardens helped build a mindset of abundance and local self-reliance, despite the ravages of WW II.
Goals: Identify and incubate high-leverage, accessible, and scalable solutions for realizing the potential of victory gardens to eliminate food deserts, fix carbon, regenerate soil, support local self-reliance and biodiversity, build healthy communities, and increase the availability of fresh, tasty food.
In addition to the previously identified problem domains, several other promising initiative areas are under consideration, including:
1. Mayacamas Sanctuary—to safeguard the critical fire and biodiversity corridors, restore the forest and habitat adjacent to the original Mayacamas Ranch, and serve as a physical, living-learning laboratory for Fire Safe and Resilient Design, Water Wellness, Backyard Victory Gardens, and the challenges other Communities of Passion, Purpose, and Practice.
2. Quality Carbon Offsets—to respond to the need for verifiable carbon offsets that incentivize regenerative farming practices and directly support smallholder farmers.
3. Conscious Transition and Green Burial—Each year, roughly 62 million people die globally and this number is estimated to increase substantially due to both aging populations and historic population growth. Addressing the psychosocial and environmental impacts of these deaths represents an enormous untapped opportunity to advance wellbeing for all.